On Sun, 13 Apr 2008 16:12:41 -0400, Bill Cole dovecot-20061108@billmail.scconsult.com wrote:
At 11:57 AM +0100 4/13/08, Douglas Willcocks imposed structure on a stream of electrons, yielding:
On Sun, 13 Apr 2008 01:39:44 -0400, Bill Cole dovecot-20061108@billmail.scconsult.com wrote:
At 9:32 PM +0100 4/12/08, Douglas Willcocks imposed structure on a stream of electrons, yielding: [...]
[...]
Thank you very much for the time you spent looking into this.
Some people spend their weekends doing crosswords or Sudoku...
They should get out more.
No. Wait...
There are still some wholes in the algorithm, but so far:
- Do the first part of HMAC as normal up to XOR'ing with 0x5c, including strangely enough what looks like a full (i.e. including nulling and padding) md5 hash if the passphrase is longer than 64 (this step should be feasible to replicate)
The HMAC specification is clear on that: if the shared secret (i.e. the password/passphrase) is longer than the hash function blocksize, it is hashed first and the hash output used as the key instead of the secret itself.
- Do the first step of md5 hashing (again, using the Perl library you suggested, it should be feasible to replicate the required functionality)
-- From now on, it gets a bit sketchy
- Using the intermediate states of Ko and Ki, extract the various segments into a char[] so you end up with an array of 32 8bit segments. I'm unsure exactly what the bitwise AND operator is used for, I thought that a bitwise AND with 0xFF would leave everything the same?
Are you looking at the RFC1321 reference code's Encode function? The point there is that the input is an array of 32-bit unsigned integers (UINT4), the output is an array of (8-bit) characters. Doing an AND with 0xFF (an 8-bit value) on bit-shifted UINT4's is a way of clearing everything but the 8 bits of interest and making the typecast formally correct. In a compilation and runtime environment that will let you play freely with pointer types, that function would be unneeded because you could just address the input as a char * instead of a UINT * and be done with it, but the formal approach Rivest uses assures that the bits are cleanly copied from an array of 32-bit members to an array of 8-bit members even on systems where a pointer cast would not give correct results.
Ok, I see why that would be necessary.
It is also important to keep the distinction between the HMAC and MD5 layers clear. HMAC can be used with any blockwise hash function, and the internal details of the hash function are not important to the HMAC layer.
I'd break it up this way, with a warning that I'm hand-waving the mathematical innards of MD5:
If the password is longer than 64 bytes, run a full normal MD5 on it and use the 16-byte result as your shared secret. Otherwise, the password IS the shared secret. In practice, it would be a good idea to simply restrict passwords in size and content because authentication clients (i.e. MUA's) are going to have issues with reproducing passwords that have non-ASCII, whitespace, and control characters.
Generate the 2 MD5 "keys" from the shared secret. In Perl this might look like this:
$Ki = "$secret" ^ (chr(0x36) x 64); $Ko = "$secret" ^ (chr(0x5c) x 64);
Keep in mind that the keys are special to HMAC, but as far as MD5 is concerned they are just the first 64-byte/512-bit blocks fed into the hash.
Initialize a fresh MD5 hash structure (if you are using a full MD5 implementation ) or just a 'state' array containing the 4 32-bit values of the standard MD5 initialization vector (if you are doing your own implemetation or have direct access to a MD5Transform equivalent.)
Add Ki to the hash. In reference code terms, this would be a MD5Update call with Ki as the input. Note that most of the logic in the reference code MD5Update is about supporting the addition of data to the hash in chunks that don't fill 64-byte transformation blocks perfectly. If you are doing your own implementation just for this application, MD5Update is logically unnecessary because you can just pass your MD5Transform-equivalent a state array with the standard MD5 initialization vector and Ki (which is a 64-character array)
The state array now holds the 'inner' context.
Repeat 3-4 with another fresh hash structure or state array and Ko.
The state array now holds the 'outer' context,
Thank you for your explanation. Using the above, the script you wrote and the Digest::Perl::MD5 source, I am now in the middle of writing a small Ruby class of my own to implement this functionality.
I'm pretty sure I understand what is happening throughout the process.
- Display a hex representation of the array contents.
Rendering those numbers as a hex string in the right order may not be obvious...
I'll have a go later today and report back any findings. Of course, I could have completely misunderstood one of the steps, and that'll screw up the others, but still.
If OO Perl is your thing, I think that Digest::Perl::MD5 has everything you need except a public interface to the state array. You can still get to it however, and to the subroutine that does the hex string rendering...
In fact, look here:
http://www.scconsult.com/bill/crampass.pl
It does have a dependency issue, in that it requires Digest::Perl::MD5.
Thank you very much for that. It's extremely useful. What's more, I would say that most of the satisfaction comes not from actually having a script that does it, but actually having a better understanding of the algorithm in general.
-- Bill Cole bill@scconsult.com
-- Douglas Willcocks